A Hobbit Birthday Party Prep:

Some of you may know, I’ve dabbled in event planning throughout my varied career, and one of my favorite things to do is throw fun birthday parties for my kiddos! After enjoying John Ronald's Dragons storybook about J.R.R. Tolkien for several years, we read-aloud The Hobbit in our homeschool this spring. Then, to my great delight, Justice wanted a hobbit birthday party… So here’s what we did!

Every great party starts with a great invite, so I re-designed Thorin’s map of the lonely mountain with party info, added Gandalf’s "invitation" to Bilbo to join them on the backside so it would be visible when folded, and printed it on some parchment-y looking paper I had leftover from another project.

I burned the edges to give it some personality, and dipped the burnt edges in water, which made each invitation uniquely watermarked. My mom had given me a set of sealing wax with a butterfly seal, and I love how they turned out! I tied a string around each one and sent them off to our fellow burglar/adventurers.

Next up was the game plan, which I intended to also be the basis of decorations. After scouring Pinterest, I knew I needed lots of big cardboard boxes to create this magical world I envisioned, so I sent out an APB to friends for their big boxes, and we got a good collection. Soon, I was ready to make myself a big ol' dragon! The kids helped me make Smaug.

As we neared the party, I finally settled on four games: Troll Tag, Gollum's Cave Hunt, Spiders and Flies, and the Black Arrow. I wanted prizes to be built into each game, so I ordered swords of Gondolin to be found in the Troll treasure hoard after Troll Tag; ring pops for our little burglars to find in Gollum's cave; bubbles/bouncy balls/suckers for when the spiders in Mirkwood were defeated, and then I decided the shooting of Smaug would transition us to the treasure hoard (food table and cake!). 

I also wanted an ambiance of quotations from the book. In my mind, I wanted the entire party to reference only the original Hobbit book, but almost as if it was taking place at Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday--so I allowed myself to describe the party as "a long-awaited party of special magnificence," (which made sense, too, since we didn't have a birthday party for Justice last year!) and to print out the iconic, "No Admittance (except on party business)" signs. (I found free LOTR fonts here that I used for all my printables, including my invitations)

Finally, I found favors; chocolate gold coins (these melted while they were in the mail and I had to wipe melted chocolate off the remaining coins that weren't ruined--I wouldn't recommend unless it’s cold weather), Hershey's nuggets, and a pipe-toy. I also tied a “the one ring” on each bag of loot (mostly these antiqued gold rings) or for the girls I included a few optional magical elf rings (similar to these) leftover from a rehearsal dinner I did for someone a while back. (These are the favor bags I used.)

Now it was just a matter of pulling all the moving parts together! Check out my next post to see how it all turned out!